The commander was bored out of his mind. He'd been looking at the holographic table for a while now, and his eyes were red from the number of times he unconsciously rubbed them. It wasn't because the computer was difficult. He figured out the patterns which the computer defaulted to long ago, and now he was just playing with his food. He ran gimmicky fleets consisting of only destroyers and bled the computer dry over a painful amount of time. Which was only painful for him, since computers didn't have any irrational feelings like getting frustrated over a simulated game.
Sometimes he wished he was just a computer. Sit in the corner of an air conditioned room and a steady source of power, and do the only thing that he was meant to do. The burdens of everything else wouldn't matter then. Just solve puzzle after puzzle, worrying about nothing else. He thought that would be as close to heaven on earth for him.
Then he was disgusted with himself, and could not torment the computer enemy any further, so he left the battle room, back into the sunlight. But the thoughts did not leave, and prickled at the edges of his mind as he lay in bed in the middle of the day. He would've counted the dust motes shining in and out of view of the beam of sunlight cutting the dim room from a crack in the curtains had the place not been completely spotless.
—
There are many beliefs about the kitsune. Some are depicted as tricksters or seductresses, who employ their ability to shapeshift for their own perverted amusement. Others are faithful guardians, those who protect like a parent watches over their own children playing in the yard. But above all, they were wise and capable of the supernatural.
Amagi always enjoyed teasing others (especially Kaga when they were both younger) and no one could doubt that Amagi was fiercely protective of her family. But she could not conjure a rabbit from a hat, control the weather, and she was definitely not wise.
If she was wiser, then she could have been able to see how her sweet, rambunctious younger sister would turn out in her absence. If she was wiser, then she would have been able to prevent the tragedy which befell their nation from Akagi's desperation. If she was wiser, then she wouldn't keep making mistakes in the present, leaving regrets where they were instead of trying to fix them.
But at the very least, she thought, this was step one.
Amagi came to the door of the commander's quarters, and knocked on the door smartly three times. Even through the thick oaken door Amagi could hear the rustle of the Head Maid's dress before she opened it.
Belfast opened the door, but stood in front of it like a guard dog. "Good morning, Miss Amagi. I'm afraid that the commander is not in his room at the moment. You might have better luck at his office."
Amagi smiled. "It's a good thing then that I'm not looking for him. I wanted to speak with you."
Belfast blinked once, then stepped aside. "Then please, make yourself welcome."
Amagi walked inside, surveying the contents of the commander's quarters. If she didn't know any better, she would've thought that these quarters haven't been lived in by anybody at all. No dirty dishes in the sink. No telltale scent besides the fragrance of air freshener. All of this was taken in the time it took for Amagi to walk from the entrance to the table, where there was a stainless white tablecloth and a glass vase containing some water and three withering roses.
Belfast came by with a tray balancing a tea kettle, two cups, and a dish of varying biscuits. She poured the tea into the cups with nary a splash, passed one to Amagi. Amagi waited for Belfast to finish pouring her own, and she took a careful sip. Earl gray. Hot enough to feel the warmth run down her throat, but not hot enough to scald her tongue. Although not her favorite kind, still perfection.
Amagi put down her teacup, where it clattered on the tiny plate. She noticed that her hands were trembling slightly. It had been a very long time since she felt this apprehensive. Then again, she had never stretched out her neck for someone else either. So she swallowed her pride and asked, "Miss Belfast, I come to you because I am worried about the commander. Can you tell me about how he is doing?"
—
When the commander was younger, he was a thinker. His parents and all of his older relatives had told him such. They always said that whenever they saw him, he was always hunched over a book, a magnifying glass, or a particularly interesting plant, studying all of its little details. They thought that he had all the makings of a great scientist.
He often wondered where all of that concentration went now. Even though it was only the second day, and he was already bored and tired out of his mind. The past hour had been spent sending single ships into an impossible armada, and watching how long it took for each light to fizzle out as they marched to a certain death. The one that lasted the longest was a destroyer, which by all odds managed to avoid any direct blows until it was finally in range of a heavy cruiser. The destroyer's guns were useless against the thicker armor, where finally in point blank range, the destroyer was summarily destroyed.
No other ship had come even close.
It was only after he watched a battlecruiser instantly disappear did he realize he did absolutely nothing productive. He slapped himself in the cheek a couple of times, but his head still felt like it was full of molten lead.
There wasn't really time to waste. Amagi would be coming in a few hours. For once, he wanted to be proactive and work instead of resting on his laurels, and he just sent imaginary ships to their oblivion. He wondered if that was how it felt to lose. Doing stupid things on purpose.
He also absently wondered what would happen if he actually sent ships to a certain fate. He tried to imagine Akagi and Kaga drifting in the ocean, moments before being enveloped by the endless blue, without a trace. He didn't know if they bled. But that image made him banish it from his mind, lest he begin putting other faces in their place.
That cold shiver danced along his back. Memento mori. It hadn't happened in a while, but it always seemed to sprout when he was able to think alone. The computer did not suffice for actual company. He returned his focus back to the terminal. But yet again, he did not realize his focus was lacking until the door crept open once again, and Amagi beheld the commander mindlessly watching blips of light arise, blink out, over and over again. He jumped as Amagi walked in, like he was caught by his parents red-handed.
"Relax, Shikikan-sama," Amagi said. "It is only me."
That wasn't why he jumped, but he did not correct her. He only nodded and returned to his seat. Amagi brought up a chair and sat across from him. The holographic table was only a few meters long, but from his perspective it seemed like the gap spanned a river. In the dusky room, where the majority of the light came from the table, Amagi looked especially sickly. He bit his fingernail on his left hand.
"Are you ready to begin, Commander?" she asked, with a tone of concern.
He turned his gaze back to his side of the table, unable to maintain eye contact. "Yes. Let's."
Amagi pursed her lips, but let the matter drop. A light wall materialized in between them, cutting each other's view, bisecting the table. Without any fanfare, the mock battle began.
—
In his days of academy, the commander had always leaned towards the strategy aspects more than any other cadet. The majority of them obsessed over the caliber of the shells and the classes of the ships, but those had always run right past his head. When the mock battles began after the tedious lectures, he thought his first victory was a coin flip. The second one was a fluke. But with each successive victory, he had left them all coughing in his wake. But with each one, the compliments from his opponents became dull silence, and from the silence the taunts were borne.
And instead of the rush he felt with each victory, he began to dislike stomping his opponents. So he started to play stupid. Leave his flanks open. Split his force unnecessarily. Charge recklessly. His victories were narrower and narrower, until one of the brighter cadets had him down to a single ship, and won the coinflip.
He had seen how everyone flocked to that guy's side, and how everyone had cheered and put him on their shoulders, and marched out. Everyone marched out without him, and there was no one left but him. Maybe a bigger, better person would have congratulated them all on their victory. But at that moment, he could only taste bitterness. He could've easily won. There were a double-digit number of opportunities where he could have seized upon a weak spot and forced a win. But he hadn't. And this was how he was rewarded for going easy on them.
He never lost again. The silence returned with the total stomps, but it was far better than the alternative.
—
Amagi wondered what was running in the commander's mind as of this moment, where she couldn't see behind the partition between them. It seemed like it was only last week where everything was alright. But the cycle had begun anew. And her conversation with Belfast had illuminated nothing. She knew precious little about him. She had tried to pry into him one dinner. He didn't speak for the rest of the meal, nor did he even eat. So she never tried again. But she was distracting herself, there were the blips on the radar which showed the recon planes flying into view. They were shot down, but likely not before they reported back where her entire contingent was. Stupid, stupid. Should not be getting distracted in battle, even during a stimulation.
Amagi took a deep breath, and focused.
—
The commander was silent. The table had been turned off a long while ago, but neither Amagi nor he moved from the places they sat. There were a million lines of thought running in his mind at the same time, the terrible amalgamation of it together sounded like white noise. For some reason, he could not believe that he had lost.
He lost. It was a simple fact. A point which could be conclusively proven or disproven easily. Only a fool would argue otherwise. But it did not seem to get into his thick skull.
Amagi had also said nothing since the battle's conclusion. He didn't know if she pitied him or was taunting him. But he didn't want either. His ears felt like they were burning.
He got up quickly. "Thank you for the practice. I need to go." He bumped into the table on the way out, slammed his hip into the doorway, and slammed the door behind him. It hardly hurt. His hands were clenched into fists, where his uneven fingernails didn't pinch into palms from being nibbled down to its cuticles. He didn't know why he was doing it. He just knew that he had to get back to his room.
He ended up barging into his room, almost crashing into Belfast. She was saying something, probably an apology, but he wasn't listening. He went to his room, locked the door, and threw himself face first into his fresh sheets. They smelled like detergent.
He expected to cry. But as he lay there and the seconds ticked away into minutes, he realized that he was not going to. But all the tension slowly leached out of his muscles, taking his energy with him. He felt incredibly tired. It was only the afternoon, but he fell asleep like that, in his uniform and all.
—
Unicorn was not what someone most would call a people person. She was far too timid for that. If life had its way, Unicorn would have been content with just U-chan. Friends were nice, but she could whisper all of her darkest desires and dreams to U-chan. And U-chan had promised to never say a word to anyone else.
Which was why Illustrious had always gently pushed against these circles of salt she drew around herself. Outside of the obvious urges to get Unicorn to talk with other people, Illustrious took her to music halls to listen to Bach. They also went to the few art galleries which were available to them, which contained pieces from both small amateur artists and kansen. And at night, Illustrious never forgot to read a couple pages from great novels or some poems from cultures everywhere.
Unicorn had wondered several times why Illustrious was so insistent on bringing her along. She wondered if it was because Illustrious didn't know anyone else who enjoyed the fine arts, but she knew that wasn't the case. More often than not, Illustrious brought companions to the concerts and exhibitions: her sisters Formidable and Victorious, or her friends both within the Royal Navy and outside. But the bedtime readings were always between just Unicorn and Illustrious.
Unicorn remembered one night where it was particularly stormy. The rain pelted on the window in a steady rhythm, and her room would flash from a bolt of light and then a boom of thunder would seem to echo for minutes after the initial blast. She had clutched her doll tighter with each streak of lightning. Illustrious was late. She was out on sortie, but she had promised to be back in time for the bedtime story.
Unicorn didn't think that she was one who needed something like a bedtime story to sleep, but the combination of a late older sister, the storm, and a routine missed made it all the more difficult to fall asleep. Even when she had put her head underneath her comforter, the lightning could still be seen illuminating the room, and there was no pillow thick enough to block out the thunder.
But minutes passed, and there was no warm hand which would close the curtains and comfort her. So Unicorn steeled her resolve, and pulled herself out from the safety of her covers, and closed the curtains herself. And it was that moment Illustrious walked in with her nightgown, and saw Unicorn up and about instead of in bed.
"Couldn't sleep? That was my fault. The battle was stretched out for much longer than I expected." Illustrious crouched down and gave Unicorn a peck on her forehead. "Do you still want a story?"
Unicorn thought about it for a little bit, then nodded. Illustrious smiled, and began browsing the shelves while Unicorn returned back to the warmth of her bed. Illustrious returned and sat in a chair by Unicorn's bed and turned to a page in a well-used but cared-for book.
"The storm reminded me of a certain poem. It's called 'Do not go gentle into that good night,' by Dylas Thomas."
Unicorn snuggled, closed her eyes, and listened to Illustrious' melodical voice.
"Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night."
Unicorn thought there was more, and waited. But when Unicorn opened her eyes, Illustrious was keeled over in her chair, asleep. Her finger rested right at the end of the second stanza where she left off. Unicorn considered letting Illustrious sleep there. She looked exhausted. But then she thought the better of it, and shook Illustrious awake. They both slept on Unicorn's tiny double bed, but Unicorn did not sleep until long past midnight.
She had seen her calm. She had, rarely, seen her angry. But that was the first time she had seen her so vulnerable.
—
Unicorn remembered that moment over tiny snippets of time: at some of the tea times, at the beach, and the canteen. But unlike her sister, he had no pretenses of constant strength. If anything, it seemed like he made it a priority to seem disorganized and absent-minded all the time.
It was in Unicorn's nature to worry about him. She couldn't understand someone who would be complacent enough to be content living life face-down. Only true evil people in stories deserved a fate like that until they repented. And the commander wasn't a bad person. So Unicorn wanted to help him, but she didn't really know how. But she was determined to find out.
Unicorn knocked on the door to his office that next morning. She managed to do some asking around, which was painful, but thankfully the first person she asked, Z23, had said he was most likely there. It made sense, because nobody ever saw him out and about very often. Some claimed to have never seen him at all.
But even when Unicorn knocked and waited patiently like Illustrious had instructed her to do, there was no answer. What was it that Illustrious said? To knock three times, and wait because you didn't want to rush whoever was on the other side. But several minutes had passed, and not a peep was heard from the other side.
Maybe he didn't hear her. She knocked again three times. He had to have heard it that time, right? But another couple minutes had passed, and there was no answer. Was he somewhere else? She tried the doorknob. Locked.
Unicorn sat and put her back against the wall. If he wasn't in, then she could wait.
But not one minute after she sat, the door gave way, and Unicorn squeaked as the door she rested on gave way into the office. It took a second to realize that Unicorn was not the only one who made such a noise, as Unicorn saw from her spot sprawled on the floor that the commander was indeed in his office the whole time.
Unicorn couldn't think of anything to say, and apparently neither could he. Unicorn wondered why he didn't open the door when she first knocked, but decided not to ask when she saw his haggard face. He looked terrible. He didn't even have the energy to close his mouth all the way, and by how his skin drooped, it looked like he aged thirty years. Unicorn was afraid, and hugged U-chan tighter.
The commander gazed at her levelly for a minute, but then stomped back to his desk and collapsed into his chair. The swivel chair whined with his sudden weight, and he went back to his papers on the desk.
Unicorn took this to be a wordless admission into his office, so she carefully got up and closed the door behind her, and locked it. She went to the couch and sat carefully so as to not make a single sound. She took the fact that he wasn't yelling as a good thing. But she felt the blood rush to her face, and buried her face into her plush. What was she doing? She didn't even know what to say. She wanted to help, but didn't know how.
Unicorn looked back towards him. His eyes were still stuck on the same piece of paper, probably still stuck on the same word. She hoped that he would start up a conversation, like all the other adults usually did. It took some tenuous minutes for her to realize that he was content to remain silent. Unicorn opened her mouth, but the silence was overpowering. And she could not find the strength to speak up.
So she did the next best thing. She got up and went to his side. She had to stretch her neck to see the words on the page. The commander saw this and shifted the pages away from her view.
"What are you doing?"
"I was wondering what you were doing." Unicorn had to swallow to get rid of the dryness in her throat, but even then her voice sounded weak.
"It's nothing important," he said, but even still he had the pages turned away from her.
So Unicorn moved to the other side of the desk, but he moved the papers once she tried looking again. She frowned, and tried one more time, and once again she was rebuffed. The commander got the displeasure of seeing Unicorn's hurt expression when he snuck a glance. Even the plush doll seemed to be expressing its disapproval. He hesitated, and lay the papers flat.
Unicorn couldn't understand a single bit of it. Illustrious had always encouraged Unicorn to use increasingly difficult vocabulary, but she had never seen half of the words on the page before. She furrowed her brow in perfect concentration, but somewhere in the second paragraph, she gave up. Unicorn had the odd suspicion that even if Illustrious had read it out loud, it would be nothing like the structured sentences and melodical stanzas that she usually read.
"I told you it was nothing important," he said.
That only spurred her to force herself to continue reading the words which were nightmarishly long and difficult, the sentences equally perplexing. It took several agonizing minutes for Unicorn to make her way to the bottom right of the page, but when she finished she beamed at the commander.
"Did you even understand any of it?" he asked.
She thought about it for a second, then her cheeks became tinged red, and she hid her face behind her plush. He could only make a noise somewhere between a chuckle and a sign, and put his hand on her head. It rested heavy on her scalp, like it had the weight of his entire arm. "That's alright. I can barely make out seventy percent of it on a good day anyways."
That made Unicorn feel better. But then she started to squeeze into the little space on his large office chair between where he sat and the right armrest, and he didn't realize what was happening until she was already resting comfortably in that small area, putting her weight against his side. Unicorn could feel him tense up, which only went away after time passed.
"Um, Unicorn. Do you want to explain why you're sitting on the same chair as me?" It was uncomfortably snug, especially with the plush.
With her tiny voice, Unicorn said, "I was wondering why you looked so sad today."
The commander's voice caught in his throat.
Unicorn didn't meet his dumbfounded eyes. "And it makes me sad because when you get sad you stay sad. When I'm sad I feel better the next day. But for you it stays." She rested her head against his side. "Sometimes Unicorn wishes that you would just talk to her."
There was a long silence as she waited for his response. Eventually he let out a sigh which should have only come from wizened old men. "I wish that, too."
Unicorn grasped his arm tightly, pleadingly. But he returned to his papers, and Unicorn could hear the forms being shuffled around and filled out this time. And she began to despair.
"But, Unicorn…" he began, out of nowhere. "Thanks for being concerned about me."
She looked up from her lap in hopes of seeing his gaze soften by any fraction. But it did not have a single ounce of sincerity in it. Just the same old tired face she was used to, but with a hint of callousness she did not previously know. He did not look back, but had all of his attention on the forms in front of him.
Unicorn stayed at his side for a long time, sharing body warmth. But this physical proximity meant nothing to her, who never felt further from the commander than ever. She bit her lower lip, and had to suppress a shiver. It was cold.
